Canadian university launches project to fix DCIM

Ontario’s McMaster University research center has received a $1 million grant to support a project to build a better data center infrastructure management (DCIM) system.

The university’s Computing Infrastructure Research Centre (CIRC) and local modular data center company Cinnos Mission Critical Incorporated, hope to build the “best-in-class” system to monitor data centers, supported by a colaborative research and development grant for nearly $1 million from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and more than $1 million in cash and kind from Cinnos.

DCIM de-stress

“The technologies from this project will produce the best-in-class data center infrastructure management (DCIM) systems in the $100B+ global data center industry,” said Hussam Haroun, founder and CEO of Cinnos, a data center technology firm which spun off from McMaster, and which makes pre-configured data center rack modules, and which has a patent for mission critical rack modules.

Data centers are still designed inefficiently, according to the McMaster release, which says they often only use ”about 15 percent of their capacity”, and puts the lack of standards for real time monitoring down to the fact that data centers have thousands of differently designed components, and says that dealing with the amount of data generated can be “a big challenge”.

Ghada Badawy, the project’s principal research engineer, wants to change that: “This project revolutionizes data centre operations by continuously monitoring its performance. The analytics algorithms we are developing will use the performance metrics to automate infrastructure management decisions and fault diagnosis in real time.”